


here comes a feeling you thought you'd forgotten

by unicornpoe



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Canon Asexual Character, Caretaking, Hurt/Comfort, Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist With a Cane, M/M, Mutual Pining, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Non-Sexual Kink, Non-Sexual Submission, Season/Series 03, Sharing a Bed, Touch-Starved, author is aspec, oh my god they were roommates, this is so fucking soft my dudes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-04
Updated: 2020-08-11
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:35:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25700710
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unicornpoe/pseuds/unicornpoe
Summary: Martin gathers blankets and pillows, the softest he can find; he arranges them on his couch as if making a nest and he doesn’t think about the small warm shape Jon’s body will leave behind him when he wakes, and he doesn’t think of Jon’s hair spread over cool white cotton like seaweed on an empty beach.*Jon has been evicted. Jon can't sleep. Jon can't let himself have nice things.Martin thinks he has a solution to all three problems.*EDIT 12/3/20: This work will remain unfinished.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 100
Kudos: 630





	1. chapter one

**Author's Note:**

> things you should know: 
> 
> 1\. this is IMMEDIATELY canon-divergent lol. but i love timothy stoker and wanted him to be alive forever and ever so THERE.  
> 2\. this is the most self-indulgent thing i've ever written. jon angst! non-sexual soft kinkyness! people not dying! it's for me, but i'm posting it because i don't want it wasting away in my google docs anymore.  
> 3\. the government is trying to tell us it’s spelled “john” but i violently and willfully refuse to accept that. 
> 
> TWs/CWs: canon-typical jon sims hating self-care, minor discussion of injuries (scars/burns), nightmares

Jon comes back from America. 

He’s a mess. 

Martin watches him. The way he jumps at the slightest sound; the too-fast quiver and dart of pupils blown wide, deep set in hollow shadows; his shaking hands. 

It seems likely that Jon isn’t leaving at night. So far Martin hasn’t been able to catch him out, but sometimes when Martin arrives at the Archives early enough there’s a toothbrush at the sink in the staff bathroom. 

Sometimes Jon is just sitting where Martin left him the night before, folded over his desk, in the same too-big clothes. 

But he always smiles at Martin when he sees him. 

It is a tight, drawn-on, weary thing. 

Jon walks through the Archives now with a cup of coffee clutched tightly in both hands. He’s left his cane in his office—the cane he has used since Prentiss and her worms, there for bad days, although Martin doubts Jon’s really had a good day in a very long time—so his steps are slow, and he makes a face like something hurts as he moves past them all with his head down. 

Melanie doesn’t look at him, and neither does Basira. 

Tim stares like a brand. 

Martin is caught somewhere in the middle. Caught between watching him closely for any hint of a stumble, and casting his eyes away, giving him some privacy in the wake of Tim’s scalding gaze. 

In the end he settles on something pathetically halfway: glances from his computer to Jon’s wavering form, an endless exchange. 

A flick of his eyes up and—oh. Jon’s door has swung closed and his burned hand is too clumsy wrapped up in gauze as it is, he can’t curl it around the handle— 

Tim makes a light scoffing noise as Martin rises, as Martin hurries toward Jon, but he doesn’t say anything, and Martin—resolve setting his jaw, setting the slope of his shoulders—doesn’t stop. 

Jon jumps again when Martin comes up behind him, looking back with those wide, scattering eyes. His lips part. 

Softly, Martin winces. The tear in Jon’s throat is ragged and the burn on his hand is angry. 

But “Here,” says Martin, and then, “I’ve got something I need to, um, discuss with you, if you don’t mind, just inside…” and bumps open Jon’s door as smoothly as he can manage. 

It is terribly unsubtle. Jon sends him a look that burns with embarrassment and softens with thanks, and Martin knows the best thing he can do for Jon’s pride is to ignore it. 

So he does. He keeps his gaze trained on Jon’s, and he waits to be asked in. 

“Oh,” says Jon quietly. Realization. His eyebrows are tilted upward in the middle, a gentle little angle. “Um, of course, come, come in, Martin,” he stutters, gesturing Martin forward with two spots of color high up on his thin cheeks. 

Martin enters, and then he waits for Jon to move around him, and then he softly shuts the door. 

Well, he’s helped. He’s in. 

Only now he has to say something. 

Jon is simply standing in the center of his office. The coffee steams merrily in his good hand, and Martin’s glad the lid appears to be on tight: with the way Jon shakes now, the liquid would be sloshing out onto his skin without one. 

“Right,” says Martin. “Uh, I—” he casts around for something to say. There must be  _ something;  _ something he can use to save both Jon’s pride and his own, something work-related— “are you sleeping here?”

Immediately Martin clocks that that was worse than even the truth would’ve been, but the words are out now, and he can’t force them back in. 

“Fuck,” he says, stunned at himself, and then “oh, sorry, I mean—oh god,  _ sorry,  _ Jon, that’s not my place—” 

“Yes,” says Jon faintly. 

“I’m—sorry. What?”

Jon is staring at him in that way of his. Close and probing, like if he only looks hard enough he’ll find the answers to all the questions he forgot to ask. 

The surface of Martin’s skin heats like a candle flame. 

“Yes,” Jon repeats. Martin expects shock or embarrassment or anger at oversharing—but there is only more of that same weariness in Jon’s face. Weariness and resignation. “Yes, I’m sleeping here.”

“Oh,” murmurs Martin. Without conscious thought, he’s made his way across the office to where Jon stands; he shoves his hands in his pockets so he won’t reach out and touch. “Jon, that isn’t good for you.”

Jon nods at him. He laughs—it is a laugh only in name: frayed edges and a  _ whuff  _ of air—and then nods again, and again, holding the coffee cup too tightly. “No,” he says, “I don’t suppose so.” 

Martin… Martin would like to step forward. To pick him up. To—to never let him go. God _ ,  _ Martin would like that.

“What could I do,” Martin begins carefully, slipping his voice into the quiet around them so as not to rip it, “to get you to go home tonight?”

“Martin, I can’t.”

Martin expected this. Jon is stubborn to a fault, seems to  _ want  _ himself to be in pain, and that—that is a thought Martin doesn’t wish to dwell on. 

“Just one night,” Martin says. His voice is far too tender. He can’t pull it back in again, not now, not with just a breath between them. “And—”

“No,” Jon says again. That line across his forehead. “I mean, I  _ can’t.  _ I’m—when I was… gone. Kidnapped, and then, then, America, and kidnapped again…” he trails off. His bandaged hand flutters, and the corners of his mouth fold as if it hurt. “Nobody was paying my rent. And, and, ah, it was a while. I, um. I suspect Elias finds it more  _ convenient  _ to have me here, anyway, so.” 

A shrug. Shoulders like fence posts. 

Martin can fill in the rest for him:  _ So here I am. So I just stay.  _

“Stay with me,” Martin says. 

He didn’t mean to let it out that quickly, but he’s never been good at speaking around Jon Sims, so why should he be now? 

And this he doesn’t want to take back. 

Jon’s eyes widen. His lips part. 

Martin’s cheeks are blazing, but it’s less with embarrassment and more with this awful, tender, fervent kind of feeling that always springs up within him when he looks at Jon for too long. 

It’s an I-want-to-keep-you-safe feeling. It’s let-me-hold-you-close and please-be-alright. 

“Just until you find a place,” Martin says. “I mean, as long as you want, obviously, but. It might be a while, and I slept on that shitty cot for  _ months,  _ I know what it does to your back.”

“Martin,” says Jon, soft like he almost never is, and it punches Martin right in the center of his chest. “I couldn’t... impose like that.”

The fact that he didn’t immediately say no is enough. Martin knows he’s won.

“Impose.” Martin brushes the word aside gently. He might not know how to talk to Jon Sims, but he knows how to navigate him: the way to bend conversations around his stubbornness, his self-image, his pride. How to offer comfort in a way that Jon can allow himself to accept. “You’ll be doing me a favor. All I’d do is stay awake all night worrying about you otherwise.” 

He says it like a joke, but it’s absolutely true. 

“Well,” says Jon, “well.” And then he looks up. Dark, dark eyes. “If you’re sure, Martin.”

“I’m sure,” Martin says. He offers up a smile, tempering its edges to look neither too eager or too worried. “It’s not like… I mean. We don’t want to make things  _ too  _ convenient for Elias, right?”

Jon sways a little in the center of this room, back and forth on the soles of his feet so slightly that you wouldn’t see it unless you looked closely. 

Martin is looking closely. 

“I’m not sure it makes much difference, Martin,” says Jon, and his voice is hollow and his breaths are restless. 

“Come on,” murmurs Martin. He wants to touch. He doesn’t. His heart pummels a bruise on the inside of his ribcage. “Don’t think like that. It—it has to.”

A lift at the corner of Jon’s mouth. 

“Perhaps,” he says finally. Nothing of him is steady but for his gaze. 

*

Tim is watching Martin when he steps out of Jon’s office and shuts the door softly behind himself. 

He’s leaned back in his chair, his feet resting on the edge of his desk. Tim doesn’t even pretend to work anymore. 

“Don’t be a fool, Martin,” he says. 

His voice is scraped and hollowed out, rough and round. He never would have said that to Martin a year ago, even if he thought it—even before Jon ever smiled back at Martin, Tim never would have made fun of Martin’s hopelessly foolish devotion. 

But Tim is raw and aching now, and for the second time today, he doesn’t hide the scoff that wavers at his words. 

“He needed a place to stay,” Martin says quietly. Tim’s words don’t sting as badly as they are meant to. There is something broken inside of him, and however much he means to hurt, he is Martin’s friend. Martin remembers that, and puts his head down. “He was grateful.

A noise like a laugh, and a splintered end. 

“Don’t let him in your apartment,” Tim says, a fervor to the command that rings with honesty and forces Martin to fight back a flinch. “Don’t let that monster near you.”

Martin slams his desk drawer with too much force. 

Quiet. Head down. Tim is hurting, and later, Martin will bring Jon home. 

“He isn't a monster.” Martin busies his hands. “And I’m not a fool.”

*

Martin goes by Jon’s office again once everyone has left, knocking softly against the doorframe. 

He had been recording a statement earlier in the afternoon—Martin can hear Jon’s voice as he passes by, that low-smooth tone—but there has been mostly silence from him these last few hours, so Martin doesn’t feel bad about interrupting. 

There is a pause, and then Jon, distracted: “Come in…”

Martin does. Jon’s office is dim, seems to drink in the hallway light. 

He sits at his chair, and the line of his spine and neck and bent head is a careful, fragile curve. His temple leaned against his wrist; his burned hand sat next to a long-cold cup of coffee, fingers curled inward like protection. 

Martin feels brash and almost raucous disrupting the stillness of this little scene. 

Jon’s glasses are slipping down his nose. 

“Ready to go?”

The initial contact is one of guilt, but there is something… there is something lovely about the way Jon resurfaces from reading. Long slow blinks like waking from a dream. 

“Martin,” he says, and his hand falls to rest beside the other. The sloping spine unfurls. “Well. You could… go home, Martin, of course, I just have a bit to finish up…”

A year ago Martin never would have felt this surge of iron-willed protection that he does now. A year ago, nothing was the same. 

“Jon,” he says, firm, different enough than his usual tone that Jon’s eyes meet his and the gaze catches. His mouth has gone soft with surprise. “It’s after seven, and I’m pretty sure you haven’t left this place in a month.” He takes a step closer to the desk, and the tilt of Jon’s neck changes to accommodate him. “The work will still be here in the morning.”

“Not if I do it tonight,” Jon says, but there is no sting to his words. They’re contrary on autopilot. Martin wants to smile a bit, and does.

“C’mon, Jon,” Martin says. He’s already wearing his own coat, his scarf looped loosely around his neck; he pulls Jon’s heavy woolen number off the rack by the door and holds it out. “I know you’re tired.”

It’s a tricky dance they do. Too distant, and Jon is distant right back; too familiar, and Jon shuts down, folds in on himself like the petals of a flower. 

Martin has taken a chance, and it seems to have paid off. Jon nods, chin dipping so that the light from his desk lamp catches his dark eyes and makes them glow, and stands with his form of unsteady grace. 

And Martin—well. He doesn’t think about it. 

He meets Jon halfway. He holds up Jon’s coat by the lapels, open and expectant, like it is easy, like it is nothing. 

Jon stops. 

“Oh,” says Martin. He feels his face flush, and yet his arms won’t lower themselves, and yet he doesn’t step away. “God, sorry—”

Jon steps forward. Jon lowers his eyes. Jon turns around. Jon lets Martin drape the coat over his skinny shoulders. 

His hair is caught beneath the collar fold. Martin gathers it lightly (softness on his palm) and tugs it free, and it flows like water over his fingers. 

An anchor in the base of Martin’s stomach, tugging sharp and swift. 

They leave the office, and they don’t talk about it.

The wind outside is sharp with chill, nipping beneath Martin’s scarf and sleeves. He holds the door for Jon—an instinct—and Jon is warm as he steps by, both hands clutching the handle of the bag that he’s been living out of for longer than Martin probably knows. 

It feels good, getting him out of here; good in a futile kind of way. 

It feels like shaking a fist at the sky and watching it blink lazily back. 

*

“I’ve got, um. A spare room—well office, really, but I never—uh, it’s empty right now, of course, but tomorrow we can bring a mattress up for you? Sorry about tonight, though, I hope the couch is ok—”

“Martin—”

“—although you’re more than welcome to take the bed tonight and I can sleep on the couch. Actually you know what, yeah, why didn’t I mention that first, please take the bed—”

“ _ Martin.” _

Jon’s hand on his arm. 

Martin blinks at him, overthrown, and Jon removes his touch with a faintly guilty expression. Martin doesn’t know how to tell him that he liked it without sounding as desperate as he really is, so he says nothing. 

“The couch will be just fine,” Jon says. His voice is at once exhausted and constrained, like age-old vellum, like dust. There’s that smile. It cuts Martin open. “Thank you for all you’ve done, Martin.”

He uses Martin’s name like punctuation. 

“Wish I could do more,” Martin says, hiding behind a quiet laugh. He isn’t talking about sleeping arrangements. 

Jon looks like he’s going to fall over. He always looks like that. On a breath: “Me too.”

Martin gathers blankets and pillows, the softest he can find; he arranges them on his couch as if making a nest and he doesn’t think about the small warm shape Jon’s body will leave behind him when he wakes, and he doesn’t think of Jon’s hair spread over cool white cotton like seaweed on an empty beach. 

*

Martin wakes to a sound filtering in beneath his door, small and hurt and bent. 

For a moment he can’t parse the darkness behind his eyelids from the darkness of the room: everything is velvet black and softly shaped, disorienting in its sameness. But the sound comes again—Martin pushes the blankets aside—and the frigid temperature of the hardwood sinks itself into the thick weave of his socks, jolting him into movement. 

There is a window in Martin’s living room, and he never got around to buying new curtains when he moved. The light spills in: it outlines Jon where he stands in the center of the floor in perfect silver relief. 

The noise again. Martin’s chest goes tight. 

“Jon,” Martin whispers. His voice doesn’t carry. He moves across the floor, worry spiking from the pit of his stomach to the base of his throat when Jon’s shoulders shake. “Jon,” he says again, stronger. 

There is no response. 

Martin is nearly beside him now, close enough that he can see the way moonlight turns Jon’s eyes and skin and hair varying shades of moon-white; close enough that he can see the awful dizzy blankness of those eyes, the tight line Jon’s mouth has drawn itself into, the lines of fear in his forehead. 

His shoulders shake again and he makes that sound, that tattered gasping sound, and Martin says “ _ Jon, _ ” half in a panic and half in care, much too loud, tearing a rent in the night. 

Jon jumps. Stumbles back a few steps, stops halfway into the shadows that lurk in the corners of Martin’s living room. 

He is breathing very fast; his chest rises and falls as sharply as an ocean swell. 

He doesn’t see Martin. That much is clear. 

Martin edges closer to him, trying to keep quiet, wanting to reach out but knowing he shouldn’t. 

“It’s just me,” he says. “It’s just Martin,” he says. “Wake up, Jon, you’re alright.”

That might not be true. Martin winces at the lie. 

Maybe the movement catches at the edge of Jon’s consciousness, or maybe it’s those whispered words: he sways back into shadow and then forward once more, and when the light catches those eyes again, they know Martin. 

“I…”

Martin lifts both hands, but doesn’t move to touch. He tries not to let worry make a knot of his features. “You had a bad dream,” he says, and his voice is admirably steady. Jon trembles like a leaf. “Come sit down, yeah?”

Jon is wearing a t-shirt that drapes across his shoulders and clavicle and scoops around his neck in hanging folds. It’s too cold, Martin thinks, to sleep in just that. 

“I’m sorry to bother you,” Jon says. His eyes are very wide. He takes a step toward Martin and then forgets to step again, stuck in place, still breathing too fast. “I’ll just… I’m sorry.”

“It’s ok,” Martin says. He’s not sure that it is. Nobody should look that afraid when they’re supposed to be safe. Nobody should look that small. “Can I—can I take your hand?”

Jon is uncertain about touch. He’s never said so—would die before he said so, Martin thinks—but he’s never had to. Martin has always seen the way Jon will go stiff when someone brushes against him in the breakroom; the way he used to lean into Tim or Sasha when they slung an arm around his waist before seeming to catch himself, before flinching, before pulling away. 

As if he wouldn’t let himself enjoy it. As if he didn’t think he should.

There is none of that now. Jon nods, now; lifts a hand toward Martin—the angle of his wrist—and folds it around Martin’s. 

There is fear-strength in his grip. His fingers are cold. 

All the blankets have been pushed to the floor, leaving the couch bare, so Martin picks them up as he leads Jon over to the cushions and they sit. He keeps one for himself, and passes the other over; he narrowly avoids tucking Jon in with a flame of embarrassment that heats his skin. 

Jon takes it without letting Martin go, and then he just holds it. Doesn’t move to cover himself. 

“You know where you are,” Martin ventures carefully, “don’t you?”

Jon’s gaze is scattered and he’s clearly shaken, but he still manages a faint air of disapproval as he nods. It’s remarkably comforting when he halfheartedly rolls his eyes. “Yes, Martin,” he says, “yes, I’m at your flat. And you’re right, it must have just been… um. A bad dream.”

“Do you want to…” Martin takes a breath. Jon’s very visibly trying to calm himself down: every other breath hitches, and there’s a sheen of sweat at his hairline, and his hand shakes in Martin’s. “Do you want to talk about it?”

Jon looks away. Shakes his head. 

Martin expected that. “Do you want a cup of tea?”

Hesitation. A very slight nod. 

Great. Good. Tea is good. Tea Martin can do. 

“Ok,” says Martin, and then he waits. Jon is still holding onto him: they don’t touch at any other juncture, but their fingers are woven together as tightly as barbed wire, and he’s making on motion to pull away. “I’m afraid you’ll have to… let me up.”

“Oh,” says Jon, small, and pulls quickly away. In the blanching moonlight, his cheeks go grey. His burned hand is holding onto the blanket Martin offered him, and that can’t do anything but hurt. “I’m sorry, Martin.”

Another apology. Martin doesn’t know what to do with them all. He’s garnering a collection. 

“Hey, it’s ok, don’t—you don’t have to be sorry.” Martin shouldn’t have said anything. Martin should have just nudged him up and taken him into the kitchen, attached at the palm. “Why don’t you just sit here and rest your eyes for a mo, yeah? I’ll be right back."   


Jon looks at him. “I’m not a child,” he says faintly, absolutely no bite to the words. 

“I know you’re not.”

They look at each other.  _ This means something _ , Martin thinks, but doesn’t know what, and doesn’t know how to find out. 

“Alright,” Jon says at last. He leans back. 

Martin makes tea as quickly as he possibly can. 

He knows exactly how Jon takes his. It’s another of those little things: a scrap of knowledge that he’d like to think he picked up accidentally, but that he really knows comes from the years of watching Jon entirely too closely that Martin has behind him. He knows how Jon Sims takes his tea. He knows that Jon Sims has a complicated relationship with touch. He knows that Jon Sims will drive himself into the ground if he isn’t stopped. 

It’s not easy to take care of him, but Martin likes to do it. 

When he enters his living room again, Jon is exactly how Martin left him, like a black and white snapshot. He ruins the stillness by looking up, and Martin thinks,  _ Thank god.  _

“Tea,” says Martin redundantly. 

“Thank you,” Jon says. He’s polite only when he doesn’t need to be, and Martin’s chest hurts to look at him. Jon takes the mug carefully in his good hand; he tracks Martin’s trajectory from standing to sitting, lets his eyes linger. 

They sit there quietly for a while, space between them, blankets bunched up and put to no real good use. Jon’s burned hand keeps twitching into the nervous movement he usually employs before remembering that it’s hurt and falling still again. 

“Jon—” says Martin. 

“I’m sorry—” says Jon. 

Jon huffs a quiet sigh. He’s frustrated—but it’s obvious that the feeling is turned inward. Martin can’t put a finger on when he’d started to be able to discern between Jon’s selfward feelings and his general displeasure with others, but he’s grateful for it. 

Martin lets himself smile down at him. Hopes it’s gentle. “Go ahead,” he murmurs. 

“I just.” Downcast eyes. And when had that happened? The surface of his tea quivers gently in that unsteady hand. “I’m causing a lot of trouble. Taking up your couch and—and breaking down in your living room. You shouldn’t have to… to, to deal with that. Me.”

He’s dramatic. And earnest enough about it that Martin can’t even tease him. 

“Drink your tea, Jon,” Martin says.

Jon drinks his tea. 

_ Oh, _ thinks Martin. 

“If I minded being troubled by you,” Martin says, “I wouldn’t have asked you here. Yeah?”

Jon’s breathing has slowed down a bit since Martin found him earlier, equal inhales and exhales beneath his sleepshirt, and most of the animal fear is gone from his eyes. He swallows, and his mouth makes the shape of a laugh without any sound added to it. “So you admit I’m trouble?”

Martin blushes again, but he’s used to that. He can work through it. “The good kind of trouble,” he says. 

These aren’t daytime words. 

Jon’s head tips back to rest against the couch; his eyelids sink down, heavy and half-lowered, and at Martin’s pointed look, he takes another sip of tea. “I’m not sure anyone else would agree with you,” he murmurs. 

“They’re wrong,” says Martin.

There is no mistaking the dusky flush that sweeps over Jon then, high and dark, a swath over his gaunt cheeks. The wound across his neck is very visible from this angle, angry and red and yelling: Martin would like to curl his palm over it, hide it from sight, make it go away completely. 

Jon opens his mouth to say Martin’s name, and his lips part, but he misses the step where the word forms. 

“If you don’t think you can get back to sleep alone,” says Martin, feeling reckless, feeling bold, “my bed is large, and I… I don’t mind sharing.” 

Wide wide eyes. But Jon is leaning in, not away. 

“You can absolutely say no,” Martin says. He can’t believe what’s coming out of his mouth. “And I absolutely will not touch you if you say yes. Not without asking. Not that I—would ask. But.”

Messy, messy, messy. 

Jon doesn’t look horrified. 

But he isn’t speaking. 

“God,” says Martin. It’s so late, and Jon had looked so scared. “You can totally ignore that I just said that if you want. In fact—”

“Yes,” says Jon. 

“I—oh. Yes… to which?”

“I won’t be able to sleep alone,” he says, and the words burst out of him on so much air. “I, I, I never do.” 

The admission hurts Martin in a place that he didn’t realize could be touched. Foolish of him, perhaps. “You don’t sleep?” he asks carefully. 

Jon is shaking his head before the full question is out. “I  _ do _ —only not, not well.” A tight swallow. The calm of moments before is gone, replaced with desperation instead of fear. He hates when he thinks he isn’t communicating well. Martin wants to hold him. “I have… dreams. Like this one and, ah, and worse. Much worse.” A deep breath; one that rattles. “It might be easier,” he says carefully, “if I’m not alone.”

If it were up to Martin, Jon would never be alone again. 

Martin sets his mug aside. He draws Jon’s from him—empty—and sets it aside, too. He stands. 

He holds out a hand to Jon. 

His fingers are warmer now when they wrap around Martin’s, heated by tea and closeness. 


	2. chapter two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Jon blinks up at him, the fan of his eyelashes languid. And there he is—and there Martin is, wavering on this knife’s edge of holding back, or tipping headfirst into something he cannot name._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> holy shit?? thank you for the comments and kudos, i've been riding that high for DAYS folks

Jon is sleeping like the dead when Martin’s alarm goes off the next morning. 

Morally, Martin knows that it’s definitely very wrong to watch someone sleep. Knows that he should probably definitely look away, and get up, and leave the room, and get ready for work. Knows that he should wake Jon— 

But god. God, he looks so peaceful. 

Jon has looked hunted and haunted for so long now that Marin almost (almost, almost) didn’t remember what it was like to see him calm. The creases that have lined his forehead and the corners of his eyes and the edges of his mouth have smoothed into simple lines; the purple shadows that live beneath his eyes and in the hollows of his cheeks are present—maybe permanent—but have faded enough that Martin doesn’t ache with worry when he looks at him; the frown that he almost constantly wears is softened, sleep making a gentle shape out of his lips. 

He faces Martin across the bed. He breathes deeply and evenly, good hand pillowed beneath one cheek. 

Martin should wake him. But Jon hasn’t been sleeping well, he said so himself, and they were up so late last night… 

Martin shakes his head, frowning at himself. No. Jon will be angry if Martin leaves him to sleep all day, much as he needs it, and this goodwill between them will vanish. Martin will just have to make sure he sleeps well tonight, instead. 

He gets out of the bed and pads around to the other side to wake him. He doesn’t think he can handle Jon blinking awake across Martin’s pillow, morning-soft and sleep-dozy, warm in the same bed. 

He doesn’t touch. He said he wouldn’t. 

“Jon,” he murmurs. He is so careful. “Time to wake up, love.”

Fuck. Fuck, oh,  _ shit,  _ he didn’t mean to say that. 

He steps away as quickly as if he were burned. 

Jon shifts muzzily, turning his head so that his hair rasps against the pillowcase. He keeps one eye shut and squints the other open to regard Martin and then he  _ smiles,  _ a full stretch, nothing like these small, starved things Martin is so used to, and Martin cannot  _ breathe.  _

“Martin?” Jon mumbles. “Did you say something?”

“Oh,” says Martin, and his heart thunders. He’s not sure if he’s relieved or strangely, masochistically disappointed that Jon didn’t hear that. “Just, um. We’re gonna be late if we don’t…” 

Jon’s eyes drift shut again as Martin speaks, slow and inevitable. The laugh leaves Martin on unsteady wings. 

“Jon,” he says. Martin steps in close without thinking about it, places one hand on the mattress by Jon’s shoulder; it dips down a bit, rolls Jon slightly toward him. Martin moves back again. “You’ll be mad at me if I let you sleep in, c’mon.” 

That gaze slams open, quicksilver, and locks onto Martin’s like a bear trap. Jon frowns. “I wouldn’t be,” he says. 

“I…” Martin’s voice dries up in his throat. The way Jon’s looking at him is making his eyes hot, and that’s stupid, and he doesn’t know why. “...right,” he murmurs. 

This is what Martin thinks:  _ Stay there.  _

This is what Martin thinks: _ I’ll come back. I’ll pull the blankets up over our heads. I’ll hide you until you’re happy.  _

This is what Jon says: “I might be a bit annoyed.”

Martin laughs again, and this one has form to it, and this one does work to steady all the pieces inside of him which still feel shivery and strange. “Take a shower,” Martin says. “I’ll put on the kettle.”

*

Jon Sims is  _ not  _ a morning person. 

It’s a fact that’s ruining Martin. Just a bit. 

He’s slumped at Martin’s kitchen table currently, nursing a cup of sugary tea as he reads something on his phone with such a thunderous frown that Martin has the urge to take it away from him and replace it with a book or the newspaper or something that’ll make him smile instead. 

Martin doesn’t. Martin moves around him with ease—as if he’s ever had Jon Sims in his kitchen—and doesn’t bother smothering the smile that leaps out when Jon yawns broadly into the back of his wrist. 

“Toast,” says Martin. 

Jon doesn’t look up. He picks up the offered food with slender brown fingers and eats mechanically, so lost in whatever disturbing thing he’s reading that he doesn’t acknowledge Martin at all. 

Probably, Martin should mind. 

Jon’s hair is loose around his face again today, thick waves still holding shower-dampness. There are water-dark spots on the shoulders and collar of his button down. 

He—well. He looks as exhausted as he ever does. But there is something less lost about it this morning. 

Something to be grateful for, Martin thinks. 

Martin eats his own toast standing at the kitchen counter, back to the sink so he can watch Jon properly with half his gaze and read the news on his own phone with the other. 

It’s all terribly, terrifyingly, inappropriately domestic when compared to the rest of their lives. Kidnapping mannequins and spiders with lady’s faces and fire that melts skin like wax. It’s… it is smiling on a battlefield. It is singing over the sound of bombs. 

It’s something Martin will hold tightly to for as long as this world lets him. 

Jon sighs loudly and sets down his mobile. 

“Ready?” Martin asks as he crams the last bit of crust into his mouth and pretends away existentialism with a smile. He dusts crumbs off on the thighs of his jeans. 

“I suppose.” Jon stands slowly and reaches for his cane. He must have re-dressed his hand after his shower this morning: the bandages are bright white and snug, instead of unravelling and ink-stained like they always end up after a workday. He quirks Martin a slight and sideways smile. “Once more unto the breach?”

Martin grabs both their coats again—a swiftly forming habit—and it is nothing at all the way he slips it round Jon’s shoulders. Nothing, Martin tells himself, and his heart pounds. 

Jon turns to look at him with big dark eyes. Martin adjusts the fold of Jon’s collar. His knuckles don’t quite brush Jon’s chin. 

Outside, the sky hangs heavy-bellied with clouds. 

They’re mostly quiet on the way to work. Jon stands slim and irresolute at Martin’s side on the tube, swaying with the movement of the car but avoiding bumping into anybody but Martin on his right. His eyes move restlessly around them: Martin watches him take in every detail of every person they’re surrounded by, ceaseless, cataloguing. Watching in his own way. 

Martin wonders what he Knows. 

Jon hangs back a bit when they reach their stop, letting the tide of commuters rush around them so they don’t get caught in the swell, and Martin stays with him. 

“I’ll go in first,” Jon says as they emerge. “Just so—just because I’m always here when everybody arrives and it won’t seem as out of place. Hopefully they will all pay me little enough mind that it won’t occur to them that I wasn’t there all night.”

He says all this without looking at Martin, soft and fast, tripping a bit over his own words. 

Martin is—Martin is glad Jon’s not looking. He didn’t expect the little bit of hurt that flared brightly at Jon’s words, and he doesn’t think he did a good job at keeping it out of his expression. 

It makes sense, Martin tells himself, that Jon doesn’t want people to know they went home together. Jon doesn’t like people to know anything about him but the bare minimum. It’s nothing to be hurt over. 

“Oh, um, yeah,” Martin says, wincing at his own clumsiness. He’s fallen back a bit, steps lagging; he catches up with two big strides. “Ok. See you… this evening, I guess?”

Jon glances at him quickly, and then away. His cheeks are flushed again and Martin doesn’t know why. 

“This afternoon,” he says. 

Martin is experiencing whiplash. “Right,” he says faintly, because of course: Martin’s made a point of bringing Jon a cup of tea or a sandwich or  _ something  _ every afternoon since he came back. Usually just dropping it off on his desk while he works, but sometimes more. Sometimes staying and talking, running his mouth about nothing, just for the excuse of being in Jon’s presence. It’s another of those things Tim rolls his eyes over, but Martin doesn’t care. He’s pretty sure whatever Martin brings is the only thing Jon consumes all day. Statements don’t count. Not in Martin’s opinion.

To be quite honest, Martin wasn’t even sure Jon  _ noticed  _ these visits. 

Clearly he was wrong. 

“This afternoon,” says Martin, and watches Jon go in. 

*

Jon’s just finished a statement when Martin stops by his office to collect him that evening. There is something sated about the slow roll of his head. There is something satisfied in his heavy-eyed gaze, like finishing a good meal. 

They don’t talk about it. 

Martin leans against the doorframe. “Everybody's left,” he says softly. 

Jon nods. The dip of his chin is languid. “Tim too?”

Ah. There it is. It’s Tim Jon’s worried about. Martin can’t say he blames him: with Tim’s brand of outspoken torment, he would be vicious if he knew where Jon was going at night. 

A sharp and specific sort of hurt: he’d be worried about Martin if he knew that he was spending all this time with Jon. 

“Yeah,” says Martin, his voice too low. “Tim too.”

Jon nods again and moves to stand. “Alright,” he says. “I’m ready—”

Martin sees the moment it happens. 

It must be that Jon’s been sitting too long, or just that his leg has bent itself into the wrong shape, or that he’s tired, maybe, and slow from it; whatever the case, Jon stumbles as he rises, moving too sluggishly to catch himself, and Martin has a steadying hand around his wrist before he can think. 

They both stop moving. The air goes thick and warm. 

Martin can feel every one of his wrist bones. Straw-thin. Delicate beneath his skin. 

Jon is staring down at that point of contact. Martin can’t see the glimmer of his eyes for the way his hair falls across his face. 

Jon takes in a long, even breath. 

Jon sighs. 

_ Oh,  _ thinks Martin.  _ Oh, oh, oh.  _

“Jon,” he whispers very quietly, thumb brushing over that tender dip in the center of Jon’s palm. 

“I…” One beat, two, three. Jon’s head is still tipped down, and his shoulders have joined it; all of him drifts closer to Martin, involuntary. “Hm,” he says finally. 

Martin brushes his thumb over soft skin again. Jon shivers at the touch; Martin has to close his eyes. 

“Ok,” he says gently. Gathering himself, even though he feels witless and out of his depth. He wants to just pull Jon close and  _ let  _ him drift, but they are in Jon’s office, and there are so many reasons this needs to be put on hold. “Ok. Jon. Can you look up for me, please?”

Slowly, Jon lifts his head. 

A breath. The look he’s wearing is as delicate as the wrist beneath Martin’s hand; there’s softness there that catches Martin in all of his unguarded places. There’s a sweet sort of trust that is at once nothing like Jon is, and everything Martin should have expected he would be. 

Martin thinks of the way Jon slept so easy at his side. In his bed. 

Jon  _ wants  _ to trust people, Martin realizes. Jon wants to trust him. 

“Good,” says Martin, the word spilling out of him as instinctually as breath. He doesn’t miss what it does to Jon. His quiet inhale. The uptick of his pulse beneath Martin’s fingers. “You’re doing so good, Jon…” 

Jon smiles at that, and Martin trails off, helpless. It’s a small and lovely thing. Martin wants to touch the divot of his chin, to trace his bottom lip, to hold up the back of his hand and feel the silky-slow blink of Jon’s lashes on his skin. 

Jon lists forward. Martin doesn’t stop him. 

Martin folds Jon in close. One hand nestled at the small of his back, the other rising up Jon’s skinny arm, ghosting over his shoulder, coming to rest so gently at the place where neck and skull meet that Jon shivers again at the touch. 

Jon’s hands end up beneath the folds of Martin’s coat; they grip the weave of his jumper absently, an instinctual, hopeful kind of touch. His face is warm in Martin’s chest. 

Martin shuts his eyes. 

They stand still for a moment, the two of them, tied in a knot in Jon’s office after dark. Martin is afraid to let him go. Martin doesn’t want to let him go. 

“Jon.” He speaks the word into the soft, warmth-tangled palce at Jon’s temple, lips barely moving. “Sit down for a moment, love.”

Jon’s breath is a warm mist on Martin’s collar bone. His fingers tighten in Martin’s jumper, spasmodically at Martin’s directive; his head turns, tucking his nose into the curve of Martin’s neck and fitting his bent head beneath Martin’s chin. “I feel…” he murmurs, and then his voice fades away. 

“I know,” Martin breathes. Strokes his hand up and down Jon’s spine, a tender, trailing touch. “I know. We’re—let’s get you sat down for a moment. There you go. No it’s ok, Jon, I won’t let go.”

Jon clings to Martin’s hand as he lowers himself shakily into his desk chair, his eyes upturned and dusky, his eyes soft and drifting, his eyes large and brown and utterly trustful. 

“Good,” Martin says again. Less of an instinct this time and more of a careful, gradual prodding—and he was right. Jon blooms toward Martin at that word, tipping his chin up, like a flower aching for the sun. 

His lips curve. Dizzy and deep. Delicate. 

Martin skims Jon’s narrow jaw with two fingers; lets his thumb rest at the notch beneath an ear. 

Jon’s heartbeat is sleep-slow. 

Martin would do terrible things to keep him safe. 

“You’re doing lovely,” Martin says, because he needs to, because he wants to. Jon is floating, soft-edged and cared for, and Martin is the one caring for him, and that feels like… that feels like rightness. That feels like lost things slotting into place. “You’re… you’re lovely.”

“Martin,” says Jon on a breath, and then “you,” and then he lifts Martin’s hand to his mouth and presses his lips to the inside of his wrist. 

Something happens, then. Something—the breath drops right out of Martin. Right out of his lungs. 

_ I love you,  _ Martin thinks,  _ and I love you, and I love you.  _

“Oh god, Jon,” Martin rasps. 

Jon blinks up at him, the fan of his eyelashes languid. And there he is—and there Martin is, wavering on this knife’s edge of holding back, or tipping headfirst into something he cannot name. 

“Can you tell me how you feel?” Martin asks him.  _ I’m not a child,  _ Jon had said last night, and Martin knows that, and Martin doesn’t intend to treat him like one. 

But he thinks of the Jon responds to quiet, strong-toned words; but he thinks of the way Jon listens to orders in the outfit of firm suggestions. 

Jon hasn’t let go, so Martin stands above him, Jon’s narrow face nearly cradled in his palms. It feels almost too intimate for words. He needs Jon to try anyway. 

“I feel,” Jon says again, just as slow and unmoored as before, and that voice is tattered but soothing all the same, “like I could fall asleep if you told me to.”

_ If you told me to.  _

Martin swallows roughly. He wants to kiss the wrinkle across Jon’s forehead. “Is that a good thing?”

“Lovely,” murmurs Jon. He takes Martin’s word from before, reshapes it, gives it weight. He smiles again. He does look tired. But in a way that can be helped. “A lovely thing.”

Martin doesn’t realize he’s running his fingers through Jon’s hair until Jon leans into it. He keeps going. “Do you know why you feel like that?”

Martin thinks he knows why. 

Jon sends him a frown so small as to be almost invisible. Still, some of that floating airiness leaves his eyes; a bit of awareness drops back in. Martin doesn’t stop touching him. Not just yet. 

“I’m asexual,” Jon says. “Not an idiot.”

Martin can’t help the laugh that leaves him at that, surprised and showing it. “Sorry,” he says almost immediately; he grazes his forefinger along Jon’s temple as he says the word. “Not laughing at you. Just, that was. More blunt than I had… anyway.”

Jon looks at him with a warmth that stuns Martin into silence. 

“I’m asexual,” Jon says again. Even more awareness: he’s leaning less of his weight into Martin’s hold now, but he’s certainly not pulling away. Apparently they’re having this conversation right now. Right here. In Jon’s office. In Jon’s  _ office,  _ where Martin brings him tea. “But that doesn’t mean I… that doesn’t mean I don’t like certain things. Touch. Closeness. Ah. Letting—letting someone else, er, take control, for a bit.”

He’s gone brilliantly red at this last bit, but his gaze has never wavered from Martin’s. Martin can feel the heat of his skin through his palms. 

“Yeah,” Martin says softly. “I think that makes sense. You liking those things. Touch,” he repeats, and his hands are in Jon’s hair, on his skin, woven with Jon’s own. “Closeness.”

_ Letting someone else take control.  _

“You,” Jon says, and Martin waits for something else, but nothing else comes. 

Jon had kissed Martin’s wrist moments ago. 

Martin has to breathe in once, twice, three times before he can get any words out. 

“How do you feel,” he asks as steadily as he can, “about kissing?”

“Oh,” says Jon quietly. “Oh,” he says again, “Martin. Favoribly.”

Martin is smiling at him. He knows he is.  _ You.  _ “On the mouth? Would you like that?”

Jon nods. 

“Words, please,” Martin says. 

Jon’s pupils are dark as night. “Yes,” he manages. 

“Jon,” says Martin. “May I kiss you?”

“ _ Yes, _ ” says Jon. 

In the night, in Jon’s office, Martin does. 

Slow. Soft as anything. Jon’s mouth is warm, like velvet; Jon makes a little sound when Martin slides his hands around the back of his skull, cups it gently, tilts Jon’s head with Martin’s own palms. 

Martin swallows that noise down between sips of Jon. It curls in his stomach, and it glows golden. 

“We have to talk,” Martin says when he can breathe again, “about all of… about this.”

Jon. Looking up at him. He thrums, whole and alive. 

“Take me home,” he says, “and we will.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a short-ish one today, but the fic overall is going to be longer than i'd originally planned so that balances things out right? right. 
> 
> next up: talking about It

**Author's Note:**

> thanks so much for reading! my updating schedule is a wild beast who cannot be tamed but i usually post more than once a week so never fear.


End file.
